My story started long, long before I was born. I could go into a long and drawn out explanation about how mutation could be involved with that explanation, but I was never good with biology. My story began with the marriage of my great-grandparents in the summer of 1939. I heard stories about that day, but that day was a pretty normal day by all accounts. They were crazy for each other, so the few pictures there was of that day showed they were very happy.

The events after that day were incredibly important.

My great-grandma was not allowed to teach at the school in town after she married my great-grandpa. She was expected to the homemaker and very devoted wife. Clarine Thompson Tjaden hated being tied up by expectations. She liked to break them, and it didn't take long for her to be a force to be reckoned with, not just a God-fearing, devoted housewife.

My home town and many others in rural Iowa were a lot different than other communities in the U.S. at that point in time (even now). There was no name for them at that point in time, but the majority of those small communities had people with strange powers. In those small communities, most of the families were all related by that point, and even then, you could tell which families were connected based on the powers used by those children.

It was why the older generation helped the younger generations to control and use their powers. There was no name for them at the time, so there was no explanation for how there were people with strange powers in the population. The God-fearing Germans of my home town and the others in rural Iowa believed it had to do with a part of God's will and divine plan. Someone needed to help protect the people around us. They were even progressive enough to allow women to do those same actions since they also received those powers from God, and that was the period of time where no one questioned the will of God.

My great-grandparents had powers that were both very similar and different. She could manipulate fire, but she always needed a lighter on her person because she could still be burnt by it. He could burst into flame and fly around. That fire came from within for him, and he could stick his hand into the flames and not be affected by it.

It was only natural that they caught the attention of some military group when the U.S. finally entered the Second World War.

His last name was Phillips, and he was invited into the house with a British woman known as Carter. My great-grandma had made very, strong coffee for them and silently but gently forced them to eat something that she had made that afternoon. Phillips wanted my great-grandpa to be a part of some elite group that he had put together beyond the group that became known as the Howling Commandos.

Family legend had it that Phillips didn't want my great-grandma to come along, even if she had powers.

"There are some things she can do that I can't," my great-grandpa told him. He sounded very easygoing, but he did sound very dangerous. "You might realize that she would be needed. Probably not when we're in Europe."

That was how my great-grandparents became a part of the Invaders. We didn't know what they did as that group, but it was pretty obvious they were dealing with the worst of HYDRA and liberating their own concentration camps. There was not just my great-grandparents in the Invaders. They fought with Captain America, Bucky (before he was KIA), and a strange being known only as Namor the Submariner.

My great-grandpa was a young hothead, and he was the first to admit that he had some kind of rivalry with Namor. Fire and water didn't mix that well together to begin with, but Namor had the sense that he was superior to everyone. In the end, they earned each other's respect.

People who didn't really know any better would've said that Captain America, my great-grandpa, or Namor led the Invaders. Maybe Captain America was in charge for the most part, but the family knew a little better about the rest of that time. My great-grandma took some control of the team. She didn't take outright control, but she did speak in suck a way to convince them that her ideas or plans were theirs.

She ended up being called Spitfire because of her independent and spitfire nature. There was a story within the family when she was piloting a plane that was shot at, and she basically had to stand on one of the wings to fly it into more friendly territory. The plane crashed, and she rolled onto the ground and dusted herself off and fixed her hair when she stood to her feet. When she realized they were looking at her, she quickly broke down and freaked out to the point that my great-grandpa had to comfort her.

He was better known as the Human Torch.

The end of the Invaders happened when Bucky was killed and when Captain America crashed that HYDRA plane. My great-grandparents always told stories about him, being one of the few people in the world who had earned their respect. Over the years, they had told us stories about him in such a way that made it hard not to respect him.

They had five sons when they came back from being Invaders, and as they became older, they had a mixture of their powers, being able to control fire and to burst into flame and fly around. They wouldn't be burnt by the flames, but dehyration , extremely low blood sugar, and being very overheated were problems. Control helped.

It was the early sixties, and my grandpa was home on break when he became involved with something big, so big that history text books have gotten it so wrong over the years because it needed to be kept secret as if could ruin certain people's reputations (Stryker's father mostly. Too bad).

My granma was involved with S.H.I.E.L.D. for a short period time in the sixties before leaving very suddenly. She joined after college, and she would have been a legend if she had stayed. She was one of the agents who gathered a group of some well known names: Professor Charles Xavier, Eric Lensherr (Magneto), Mystique, Dr. Hank McCoy, and my grandpa. They were some of the heavy hitters of that small group, and that group was the first incarnation of what would be known as the X-Men. It was also the beginnings of Magneto's Mutant Brotherhood.

My grandparents were married not too long after that, and they had three boys. She became less involved with S.H.I.E.L.D. when my dad was born, but she became more of a counselor to agents. It was her way to keep an eye on things. He didn't fully agree with what Xavier was doing with what would become his school. My grandpa didn't agree with separating mutants from the population.

It was the beginnings of what we were taught in my hometown. You learn how to control your powers, and you would go into the real world to use them to help people and help teach younger mutants how to control their powers. That's what he thought would've been much better.

Me and my brothers and the other kids our age had all of those high expectations for what we whould be able to do. It's kind of hard to live up to those high expectations, but we worked to do that.

People thought that if you were not a part of Magneto's Brotherhood, you were a part of the X-Men. No. We're not a part of that group. They knew each other and were very close, so they could only trust each other, no new people or outsiders.

I'm Rebecca Tjaden, or Becca, but I'm more known as Firebird. I barely left my hometown, and I would not really leave my home state. I let other people take charge, so there was no way I'm Spitfire.

Then, there came a day unlike any other. . .